The Cactus Album

1989

140

Perhaps emboldened by the example set by the Beastie Boys three years earlier, New York’s 3rd Bass became the genre’s second major act to be led by white MCs. They also filled a void at Def Jam; following the success of Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys left the label due to contract disputes. Yet 3rd Bass’ debut, The Cactus Album, wasn’t a carbon copy—in fact, the crew dissed the Beasties on the album’s second track. Where the Beastie Boys used comedy for levity alone, 3rd Bass was more serious. On “The Gas Face,” MC Serch defended blackness, while Pete Nice took aim at shady record label executives. In that way, The Cactus Album was a bold step away from the Beastie Boys era at Def Jam: Though that group is to be lauded for the trail they blazed, 3rd Bass brought a no-bullshit energy to their music that felt new. –Marcus J. Moore

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Vini Reilly

1989

139

Durutti Column leader Vini Reilly always went against the grain of his fellow Factory Records colleagues. While Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire did chilly, industrial-tinged post-punk, Reilly rendered bucolic and poignant guitar instrumentals. But as the ’80s wore on, he began to see his instrument as just another machine. So he made another left turn on Vini Reilly, pitting his six-string against an early Akai sampler to sublime effect. Punching in snippets of soul and opera, as well as the likes of Otis Redding and Tracy Chapman to sing what he couldn’t, Reilly’s playing bounces between fado and funk. Utilizing acoustic and electric guitar—sometimes with a band, other times just him solo—Reilly staked out a liminal state, the sampled voices clipped so as to be indecipherable yet still emotionally resonant. The end result is the most eerie and affecting entry in his large catalog. –Andy Beta

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Long Live the Kane

1988

138

Back his ’80s prime, it felt like Big Daddy Kane wasn’t playing fair. He had the rhymes: steady and unbeatable, a multi-syllable flow coming at you like machine gun bullets. Then he had everything else, too: Women loved his suave nature, the way his words slipped through a silky baritone. His first album, Long Live the Kane,also proved that he could talk about topics like Afrocentricity and sound realistic. Kane’s 1988 opus gave us many of the classics in the rapper’s vast repertoire: the combative “Raw (Remix),” “Set It Off,” “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’,” and the playful back-and-forth with Biz Markie on “Just Rhymin’ With Biz.” Long Live the Kane was the foundation for a rapper who could do it all. –Marcus J. Moore

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Dance Hall Style

1982

137

Horace Andy had been a prolific recording artist for some 15 years, cutting discs for Studio One and the dub pioneer Bunny Lee, before he made Dance Hall Style. On paper, at least, there’s no reason it should stand out as a classic. Recorded at Wackies, a damp basement studio in the Bronx, it was just six songs long, and some of those had already lived a full life; Andy himself had recorded “Lonely Woman” with producer Derrick Harriott a decade earlier, while “Cuss Cuss” was a cover of a track released by rocksteady stalwart Lloyd Robinson back in 1968. But Dance Hall Style has a special alchemy. Under the guidance of founder Lloyd “Bullwackie” Barnes, Wackies had become a home for skulking heavyweight dub of the first order. The record can be sonically adventurous—on “Stop the Fuss,” a blanket of echo pushes the bass and drums to the point on disintegration—but you’re gripped tight throughout by Andy’s voice: sweet, sinuous, reflecting on greed, division and the Rasta life. One highlight is the penultimate “Spying Glass,” which Andy would later reprise on Massive Attack’s 1994 LP Protection, drawing out its themes of paranoia and surveillance. –Louis Pattison

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Raw Like Sushi

1989

136

For a few months in 1988, as Neneh Cherry’s debut single “Buffalo Stance” climbed the global charts, it looked like Madonna might have a serious competitor to her pop throne. Particularly irksome for Madonna, probably, was the fact that “Buffalo Stance” effectively beat her at her own game, using the modish club sounds of hip-hop and house to forge pop music that was brazenly cool, instantly memorable, and utterly authoritative.

Cherry’s debut album, Raw Like Sushi, which followed in 1989, took a similar approach, plucking from the ’80s club pantheon of new jack swing, freestyle, and go-go to create an audacious global pop fusion that made Cherry’s competitors look like tar-ridden dinosaurs. The fast-moving nature of club music means that today, Raw Like Sushi sounds both incredibly of its time and also strangely modern in its omnivorous outlook, while the razor-sharp observational songwriting on “Manchild”—one of the best songs ever to capture that sinking feeling that life isn’t turning out how you imagined it—ensures its immortality. –Ben Cardew

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Songs About Fucking

1987

135

Like most things with Big Black, the title Songs About Fucking is something of a sick joke. Frontman Steve Albini actually covers a wide range of unusual topics on Big Black’s second and final industrial noise-punk album: grotesque execution methods, a psychedelic fungus, cats. When sex does appear in these songs, it’s usually as a means of getting at something darker, like perversion, domination, or violence. Save for Albini’s occasional bursts of black humor, the album is unrelenting as it plumbs the depths of depravity; a more accurate title might have been Songs About Cruelty.

Such extreme subject matter demands equally extreme music—and by the end of their six-year run, Big Black were more than up to the task. Albini and Santiago Durango’s dueling guitars buzz like metal against metal (not least because they used custom-made metal guitar picks), their Roland drum machine throbs with cold precision, and Albini’s yelp alternates between coiled and unhinged. Yet as uncompromising as Songs About Fucking is, the distance between Big Black and the mainstream would soon shrink. Watch footage of the band’s final show in Seattle and you might spot a young Kurt Cobain in the audience; as the legend goes, he left the show with a chunk of Albini’s smashed guitar as a keepsake. –Mehan Jayasuriya

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Nothing’s Shocking

1988

134

Many albums on this list can lay claim to inventing the ’90s, but it took a guy like Perry Farrell to sell it. Furthering the tradition of rich kids playacting as counterculture shamans, Farrell knew the value of a good hustle, and Nothing’s Shocking found Jane’s Addiction equally believable as crass cock-rockers, Chili Pepper blood brothers, glam gutter-punks, prog-metal virtuosos, and post-punk magpies, all while adding a healthy dose of classic rock heroism. On a person-by-person basis, Jane’s Addiction is basically Led Zeppelin recreated as Los Angeles street urchins. Whether Farrell was lyrically channeling Ted Bundy, an abandoned child, a junkie, or a prophet, it was all framed in a way that could be easily understood by Midwestern kids from the suburbs. With Farrell repeating this act every summer with Lollapalooza, Nothing's Shocking now stands as a founding document of Alternative Nation. –Ian Cohen

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Skylarking

1986

133

By 1986, XTC had shrunk to a trio: three self-described “garden gnomes” from rural England with dire finances and afrontman who refused to tour. As Thatcherism squeezed Britain, the band were derided by the press as out-of-touch country boys and their label as unsellable oddballs. For their survival, Virgin demanded a surefire U.S. crossover hit. Instead, they were handed Skylarking, a grand English symphony of sun-blasted melodies, shambling psych, and wildly eccentric pop. Miraculously, America loved it.

For that, thank producer Todd Rundgren, who culled XTC’s edgier material and sunlit their pastoral whims, perhaps recognizing that American narcissism is rivalled only by its fetish for a teacup-English wonderland. There were few summertime larks in the studio—frontman Andy Partridge apparently threatened to axe Rundgren’s head—but the opulent melodies are unimpeachable. Capitalist satire “Earn Enough for Us,”the one social commentary here, coexists with bucolic scenes of “flower lava” and trees “dancing drunk with nectar”—conflicting ideas, erratic beats, and knotty compositions harmoniously daisy-chained together. –Jazz Monroe

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Steve McQueen

1985

132

Prefab Sprout were the vehicle for the brainy songs of Paddy McAloon, a wordsmith who was equal parts clever and inscrutable. Steve McQueen—released as Two Wheels Good in North America to quell a dispute with the titular actor’s estate—was McAloon's stab at pop, a suite of literate songs that draw as much from 1950s rock and country as from Elvis Costello. McAloon is known for his writing, but his lithe voice sells these songs. To hear him lean into the chorus of “Bonny” or “Goodbye Lucille #1” is to feel the acceleration of the cover’s motorbike as it rounds a curve, with Wendy Smith’s lovely backing vocals serving as guide rails. Significantly gussied up by ’80s studio wiz Thomas Dolby, the arrangements match the refinement of the lyrics. Though nostalgia cycles will continue to churn through sounds without end or mercy, the synthesizer that announces “Appetite” tattoos it to a particular moment in the mid-’80s, possibly the last time that a shrewd Englishman with a guitar and studio budget would be seen as the pinnacle of pop sophistication. –Andrew Gaerig

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Ocean Rain

1984

131

In America, Echo & the Bunnymen always seemed to be stuck between the Smiths and the Cure on one side and U2 on the other. After three albums that zigzagged between goth dirges and soaring post-punk anthems, everything came together on their fourth album, 1984’s Ocean Rain. Submitting to their tendency toward grandiosity and enlisting a full string section, Echo constructed an album of gorgeous, emotionally shaded symphonic rock. The first half of the record features some of their early jaggedness and their catchiest single, “Silver.” But the second side, opening with the breathtaking “The Killing Moon,” is controlled, elegant, and dramatic—one of the great album sides in rock. –Mark Richardson

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Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

1981

130

After starting his musical career in the late ’70s as an apprentice to King Tubby, the originator of dub reggae, Hopeton “Scientist” Brown arguably did more than any other producer to elevate dub into its own genre. Though Lee “Scratch” Perry had already taken the idea behind dub—deconstructing vocal mixes into sound collage via aggressive remixing and use of effects—as grist for full-length albums, the young Scientist surpassed even these masterpieces in sonic inventiveness. 1981’s Curse of the Vampires is one of the greatest dub albums ever, transforming the swing of dancehall’s catchiest tunes into their spookiest, most expansive selves. Historically, this record is a precursor to trip-hop and dubstep, but even encountered as an isolated sonic experience, the tracks are revelatory, uniquely suffused with an eerie joy. –Eddie “Stats” Houghton

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No One Can Do It Better

1989

129

Simply put, “The Formula,”from the D.O.C.’s 1989 debut, invented G-Funk. The atmospheric bit of jazz-funk introduced the combination of D.O.C.’s slick flow and Dr. Dre’s creeping funk production, dictating the direction of the next decade of West Coast hip-hop. But No One Can Do It Better didn’t otherwise restrict itself to that formula. On the contrary, its status as an eminently listenable rap classic remains precisely because of the way the D.O.C.’s versatile flow is showcased by a range of production styles. The rapper is always on, even when his cadence is slightly off. D.O.C. would never sound the same again after a serious car accident altered his voice and derailed his career shortly after this record’s release. So No One Can Do It Better is a rare document—even the spoken interludes that stitch it together are tantalizing glimpses of an artist in his prime. –Eddie “Stats” Houghton

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Back in Black

1980

128

Before Back in Black, AC/DC were a cult act whose songs included one about everyone in the band getting an STD and another about their bouncing Australian balls. In 1980, Brian Johnson, a Newcastle pub singer who always wore one of those old-timey flat caps, became the impossible replacement for Bon Scott. (His voice, like Scott’s, sounded like the extended yelp of a cartoon character who suddenly realizes his pants are on fire.) When Johnson joined two months after Scott’s death, founding guitarist Malcolm Young—whether from grief, disdain for Johnson’s broad frame, or some combination of both—reportedly called him a “fucking big fat cunt.”

Nevertheless, they became the biggest band in world with this album, because nothing could turn off the AC/DC hit factory: They punched Johnson into their hyper-masculine, lizard-brain rock’n’roll with Malcolm and his brother Angus writing the kinds of riffs that sounded good in a car, better in a weight room, and best in an arena. The title track was the death rattle of ’70s rock and the dinner bell for a decade of hook-heavy metal. It also contained their best, most palatable double entendre in “You Shook Me All Night Long,” a song somewhat about premature ejaculation and mostly about an endearing, feverish submission to a woman. Back in Black was an album made by terrific idiots, the true north of mainstream rock in the ’80s. –Jeremy D. Larson

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Let’s Dance

1983

127

After years of heady, singular art rock, David Bowie wanted to open up to his adoring public and talk to other music. So he borrowed the build-up from the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout,” brought in Stevie Ray Vaughan to play blues licks, quoted a line from My Fair Lady, and made the biggest record of his career. Even with all these references, though, Let’s Dance sounds anything but dated, in part thanks to Nile Rodgers’ chipper production and its crisp gated snare—the one true drum sound of the ’80s.

Bowie told Rodgers that he wantedthe album to sound like a photo of Little Richard in a red Cadillac—that’s “Modern Love.” He wanted something relatively warmer—that’s every note of “Let’s Dance,” a major hit in a minor key. That track has an odd equilibrium: Compared to other slick ’80s chart pop, there’s way too much empty space on “Let’s Dance,” and Bowie’s growling is queasy and unsettling. With its mix of panache and subversion, Let’s Dance became a Trojan horse for the world to discover all the many Bowies hiding underneath the blond bouffant and designer suits. –Jeremy D. Larson

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Actually

1987

126

Neil Tennant was a music journalist before he formed Pet Shop Boys, so it’s little wonder he was adept at melding acid social commentary with pop. There are some particularly clever lyrical turns on this album, especially on “Rent”: “I love you, you pay my rent.” Actually, the duo’s second record, did not shrink from the enormous success of its predecessor, Please. The synths this time are even more over-the-top as they match Tennant’s immediately recognizable vocals, somehow dry and impassioned at once. At the time, he was especially pissed off with Margaret Thatcher’s government and the likelihood of her re-election, and he explores his malaise with privatization and capitalism on “Shopping” and “King’s Cross.” The record even resurrected Dusty Springfield's career after she featured on the wry single “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” On Actually, Pet Shop Boys mastered the art of dealing with the decade's socio-political stresses without sacrificing the need for dance and laughter. –Eve Barlow

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Peter Gabriel

1980

125

Released in the spring of 1980, Peter Gabriel’s third album foreshadowed so much of what would happen in rock music throughout the rest of the decade; not quite adhering to the aural architecture of either post-punk or radio rock, the record nevertheless had a profound influence on both. Gabriel teamed with Steve Lillywhite—a producer who cut his teeth recording experimental punks XTC and Siouxsie and the Banshees—with the intention of pushing through the past into the future. Adopting a strict set of rules, such as the banning of cymbals, but allowing for happy accidents, Gabriel and co. developed a sound that was simultaneously cinematic and hermetic. It’s the articulation of a lively, neurotic interior world.

Underneath that eerie, sexy shimmer, Peter Gabriel teems with paranoia about the erosion of humanity, a theme that resonated strongly during the age of Reaganomics and the Cold War. But the record ends with a glimmer of hope thanks to “Biko,” an ode to the slain anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. By concluding this dark-energy record with a rallying call, not a dirge, Gabriel suggests that humanity is worth the fight. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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Tunnel of Love

1987

124

Following the unreasonable success of 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen found himself filthy rich, beloved by millions, married to a model—and scared shitless. Instead of a honeymoon, the self-consciously spare Tunnel of Love plays like the loneliest night of the soul. As he tells it in his autobiography, his first marriage often felt like a countdown to failure. Eternal vows unleashed the singer’s brooding side, and he soon began to suffer anxiety attacks and paranoid delusions. He leans into this discomfort throughout Tunnel of Love, even likening commitment to a terrifying carnival ride—replete with death-scraping screams—on the title track.

All of Springsteen’s deep-seated neuroses come forward on the album’s thematic center, “Brilliant Disguise,” and its monochrome music video. The one-shot clip finds him sitting all by himself in a quintessential American kitchen, the same sort of room where Springsteen once absorbed his depressed and drunken father’s anger on a nightly basis. As the camera inches into the singer’s face, the crease in his brow fills the frame. The song’s 3 a.m. confessions lay out Springsteen’s innermost fears, brutal in their candor: Who can I trust? Is my life a lie? Am I capable of love? A year after Tunnel of Love’s release, to the surprise of no one who heard it, Springsteen was signing divorce papers. But as long as there are people lying awake at night, twisting and tugging at their wedding rings, the album will endure. –Ryan Dombal

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Beauty and the Beat

1981

123

If Ramones’ Phil Spector-produced 1980 albumEnd of the Century proved a connection between girl groups and punks, the Go-Go’s took that idea and ran with it. Not only was the California quintet inspired by the ultra-catchy hooks and compact song structures of the Supremes and their ilk, its members had the advantage of being living, breathing girls. They understood that joy and feminine playfulness were valid emotions to pull into the kind of brash music that had inspired them to form in the first place, after seeing a Sex Pistols show. Though their punk credibility was often underestimated, the Go-Go’s laughed their way into the history books: Beauty and the Beat, their 1981 debut, was the first No. 1 record by a female group who wrote their own music and played their own instruments.

The album is full of tough, tight theme songs for the new wave generation. With its driving rhythm section and girl-gang vocals, “We Got the Beat” never quite gets old despite its ubiquity. “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the album’s other smash, fills the listener with a rush of California cool the second its muted guitar chug kicks in. Like many popular albums that are quietly subversive, the non-singles here hew closer to the band’s heavier roots: Songs about sexual autonomy and romantic disenchantment, set to furious drums and eerie electric guitar riffs, are a welcome reminder that no amount of polish could take the grit out of the Go-Go’s. –Jillian Mapes

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Beat Happening

1985

122

In 1979, a punk-obsessed teenager from Olympia, Washington named Calvin Johnson wrote a letter to the new wave magazine New York Rocker. “Rock’n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35,” he wrote. “It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautifulteenage spirit.” This idea of youth as an attitude, not an age, would eventually come to define Johnson’s band, Beat Happening.

On the trio’s 1985 self-titled debut, they gleefully reinterpret the “rules” of punk. While other underground acts masqueraded as tough guys, Beat Happening proudly adorned their record with a stick-figure cat aboard a rocketship and sang about beachside dance parties hosted by one Mr. Fish. They played rudimentary, raw songs, frequently switched roles, and occasionally ditched proper instruments altogether. Beginning here, Beat Happening used innocence as a vehicle to explore deeper, adult anxieties, emboldening a new generation to make music no matter the means. –Quinn Moreland

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Pretenders

1980

121

It’s easy to come away from Pretenders thinking only about Chrissie Hynde, the band’s dusky-voiced lead singer and composer. Hynde had fled Ohio and immersed herself in punk at its peak, working at Sex Pistols svengali Malcolm McLaren’s boutique and hanging out with the Clash; she fought hard for a spot in a band, only to be rejected time and time again. By the time she formed Pretenders, she could put an iron curtain up around herself on songs like “Precious,” and then yank it down just as quickly, revealing an unexpected vulnerability on hits like “Brass in Pocket.” She only needed 12 tracks to prove she was one of the coolest people on the planet.

Hynde also had plenty of help from the other Pretenders, who backed up her raw writing with inventive, tricky musicianship. Jimmy Honeyman-Scott could toss off razor-wire solos like the one slicing up “The Wait”and chiming, romantic leads in equal measure, and the whole band delighted in ripping through unorthodox time signatures at high speed. This version of Pretenders didn’t last long: The band was undone by the summer of 1982, with two of its members succumbing to drug addiction. That sense of impending doom makes this album’s blend of punk energy and pop sophistication sound especially poignant. –Jamieson Cox